Reading about the latest improvements seems to make Finale 26 a bust for me on a Mac, as I have never had speed issues. I will use my Finale upgrade money toward a future paid version of Dorico. It seems more likely than not that Dorico will surpass Finale in two years.

I still struggle with collisions with Expressions (and Smart shapes). How many times do you need to re-move "p < f"?
And when you transpose an instrument, it gets messy again.
Tremolo should be fixed 10 years ago. I don't think it is a feature.

Me too. What holds me back is the articulation issue when exporting a file from v26 to v25 (if I got it right). It would be easier to decide if you knew for certain that everyone would upgrade at the same time.

It would be easier to decide if you knew for certain that everyone would upgrade at the same time.

Actually, I'm always happy not to upgrade at the same time as the majority of users. The german version usually appears some months after the inital english release, and thus we used to get the ".1"-Version (2014.1, 2014.5.1, 25.1...) here at Germany, which also usually already contains some bug fixes.

All from the version (2014?) where you could open newer files in older Finales there were no big problems with that, until now, I'm told. If you open a v26 file in an older version you seem to risk your articulations being seriously messed up. I don't put any blame on MM for this, it's just that it makes me a bit nervous about upgrading to a version that could cause serious layout problems for others still with v25 when exchanging files. And vice versa, if I'm the one who doesn't upgrade.

Even if I'm not a programmer, I can see that it wouldn't be that easy to offer the choice of v26 OR v25 articulations in v 26. That would mean keeping both modes active in the same, new version. Seems not very likely.

All from the version (2014?) where you could open newer files in older Finales there were no big problems with that, until now, I'm told.

Actually, working with different versions of .musx has always had problems. There have been several new features introduced which get 'erased' by a round trip through an older app.

Take Dashed Slurs, for instance. Opening a document with Dashed Slurs in a version prior to their introduction replaces them with "normal" slurs. When the document is saved in the older app, the distinction between the two types of slur is lost.

It is entirely understandable that an old app can't save new data, but dangerous. Any collaborations need to be working on the same version. When I worked as a freelance in publishing, I had to have specific (usually the latest) versions of Quark XPress and InDesign to get the work: I couldn't just say "It's OK, I've got some old versions that'll probably do."